Lists are ubiquitous, basic organizational tools used in everyday life. Lists are useful for helping us organize our lives, schedule our daily activities, prioritize the activities of each day, and serve as a reminder while shopping, and so forth. Increasingly, our lists of information are stored electronically. In addition to storing lists electronically, remotely accessing electronically stored list information over a communication network is increasingly popular.
When accessing list information over a communication network, care should be taken to minimize the amount of data exchanged between the access point and the list's remote storage location. For example, the amount of information exchanged between the list's remote storage location and a user's local computer can be minimized by updating the list's remote storage location after the user has completed all intended changes on the list, instead of updating the list's remote storage location after each individual change to the list. Additionally, information exchanged can be further minimized by updating the list's remote storage location only for those list items that have been modified.
Repositioning a single item in a list may potentially cause the entire list to be renumbered. Thus, it would seem that in order to update the list at its remote storage location, each element in the list must be updated. When a list is stored locally, updating the entire list to storage is less problematic, i.e., not using limited network resources/bandwidth. However, updating the list at its remote storage location for each item in the list consumes limited network resources.
Additionally, when accessing list information from a remote location over the Internet using a Web browser, the list is typically displayed with related drop-down controls that identify the order of the list, and permit the user to modify the order of the list items. However, while a user may update the order of elements in the list using these controls, the ordinal values are typically updated, but the list items themselves are not rearranged on screen.
The present invention addresses these and other problems in the prior art by providing a system and method for minimizing the amount of information sent from a user's local computing device to the list's remote storage location to update the list when some of its list items have been reordered. The present invention further provides a system and method for maintaining and displaying a local copy of a list in a Web browser, reflecting changes to the order of the list elements by redisplaying the list elements in their proper order.